Seagull Lake, Paulson Lake

We slept in until 8am today. It was sunny, still and hot! Breakfast would be pancakes, bacon and pop tarts. We explored the woods behind camp for a while and built more castles on the beach. After a couple hours, we headed back out onto the lake to explore. Seagull Lake was glass today with not a hint of wind.

We checked out the campsite on Shirttail Point, which had bee closed due to the Cavity Lake Fire a few years ago. The privy and the fire grate were back now, but the camp had zero trees. The trail up to the brand new privy was rather steep, but boy were the views great. Lots of fallen trees and lots of wonderful wild flowers. This must have been a great site before the fire.

Next, we headed over to the 515 rod portage to JAP (Paulson) Lake. Why not, right? Because it is there. We started the trek just hiking around 1pm and reached Paulson Lake an hour later. The trail is a great hike, but would suck to portage. It follows a creek / swamp the entire way and is a combination of walking up high on ridges and down along the creek. High up above the creek are no trees and down along the creek it is still very green with mature trees yet. Up on the ridges you can see forver and the views of Seagull Lake and the surrounding area are stunning. The portage is mostly uphill the entire way with some flat spots along the ridges. The portage ends with a ravine / boulder field just before you reach Paulson Lake. The lake itself is all fire damage. I hear the fishing is good for lake trout. The trek back downhill to Seagull Lake took about 45 minutes.

We took our time paddling back to camp and tried fishing again with no luck. I think all the rain the days before and the front changes really stimied our efforts. We stopped for a quick picture in front of the pallisades.

Dinner would be Mountain House spaghetti. After dinner it becase rather windy, so after another brief attempt at fishing we headed back to camp for the night.